GUILT-FREE” BEER, HOW CAN

“Guilt-Free” Beer, How can you say no?

by Emily Anderson

Disclaimer: The following is a work of realistic fiction for our special 2050 issue, published in June 2021. These stories are meant to spark imagination, not forecast the future of Akron.

Tiger Street Cafe has been steadily gaining popularity since it opened its doors last summer in the heart of Akron’s downtown. If you haven’t had the pleasure of visiting yet, don’t let the humble storefront deceive you - this place changes everything you thought you knew about beer.

Inside Tiger Street Cafe you can enjoy one of their six rotating house beers on draft, or try one of their original kombuchas. They serve a quaint selection of energy bars and vitamin tonics - something for everyone. The space is simple and open, with room for live performances and dancing.

The most popular beer at the cafe is a lager called Take it Easy. It’s intended to introduce the public to Tiger Street’s beers and has a very traditional flavor. Other beers currently on tap include a “Funky Farmhouse Ale” brewed with locally grown wheatgrass, a “Roasty Toasty Porter” that comes with a shot of house espresso on the side, and a purple strawberry wheat beer called “Garden Party.”

Alex Brown, the owner of Tiger Street Cafe, is a biomedical engineer. They worked in a research laboratory that focused on liver tissue regeneration for 10 years before deciding to switch gears and focus on their true calling: brewing beer full time.

Alex’s journey to becoming a brewer was one of curiosity and experimentation. “My parents got way into cooking when they had to quarantine together in 2020. We were always eating exotic, adventurous dishes in our house after that. My dad loved kombucha and kimchi, and my mom was always pickling things in the fridge.” A passion for cooking and fermentation turned to a passion for homebrewing for Alex in college. After graduation, they came to a dilemma. questioning the morality of brewing and getting my friends drunk. I made it my mission to find a way around this issue.”

And so they did. With the help of a team of Ph.D. candidates, Alex has developed a beer that has far less harmful effects on your liver and brain than other alcoholic beverages. The cafe is named after the place where their original research lab was located, Tiger Street.

Is it still beer? “Technically yes,” Alex says, “It’s still made with barley, hops, yeast, and water. It’s still beer.”

All of the beers brewed at Tiger Street are made with the addition of regenerative molecules that combat the harmful effects that alcohol has on the liver and brain - biotechnology that Alex helped to develop themself. It’s also full of electrolytes, mood stabilizers and vitamins.

Tiger Street Beers still get you drunk, but they don’t give you a physical or mental hangover the next day. Compared to traditional beers, preliminary studies show that Alex’s beers are likely to be 75% less damaging to liver tissue over time, and 40% less damaging to brain function over time.

Tiger Street is one of just six other beer breweries in Akron. During the Brewery Boom of the ‘10s, Akron was home to over 30 breweries. While the last 30 years have seen unprecedented popularity in sobriety from alcohol, it seems that this brewery - with it’s combination of nonalcoholic options and less damaging beers - is just what we were missing in Akron.

Maybe with these new developments in biomedical technology and renewed public interest in drinking, wte’ll see a few more popping up in the near future.

You can Get Tiger Street Cafe’s Take it Easy Lager and Tiger Stripes Kombucha in most of our area grocery centers. The cafe is open every evening. Visit their website to see upcoming events or to reserve the space.

// Emily Anderson still has stouts from 2020 in her basement

by Karla Tipton

Disclaimer: The following is a work of realistic fiction for our special 2050 issue, published in June 2021. These stories are meant to spark imagination, not forecast the future of Akron.

The school rises up in a shimmering display of light, yet it’s grounded in memories as solid as cornerstones.

The holographic installation of Goodyear Middle School was constructed by holo-artist Sami Stoneman. It’s located at the property where the Rubber Bowl sat until it was cleared in 2018. Stoneman’s creation is as solid as his name, though his work is made of light.

“When I went there, it was one of Akron’s last remaining schools built with an architectural design style that married practicality with beauty,” said Sami, who attended the school from 2007 until 2010. Sami’s class was the final middle school graduating class before it was temporarily used to house the elementary school students displaced when Seiberling Elementary closed.

Decommissioned in 2017, Goodyear Middle School was originally known as East High School and was built in 1918.

Although the holographic installation is not located on its original site — which through the years has been the location of an auto mall, an office complex, and now a helio-rideshare lot from which people pool on aerial rides to travel to their jobs — former students describe the building made of light as uncanny in its penchant for calling forth memories of childhood.

“The classroom felt just as it had when I attended Mrs. Tuchman’s English class,” says Hayley Renner, 64, who was a student in the early ‘00s. “Shivers went up my spine.”

The holo-construction, which earns a place in the Guinness Digital Guide as the largest hologram ever built, is augmented with classroom audio and visuals of students and teachers chatting before class, lecturing and then being dismissed by an old timey sounding bell. the early 1990s. He has visited the installation twice for the hour-long tour around the perimeter and inside the holo-constructed classroom and cafeteria.

“It really brings it alive,” said Eillian Talib, 23. “Kids having to walk to school, or take a ground-bus. Then they had to spend the whole day there. It’s sort of wild to think about.”

The contrast between now and then couldn’t be more stark. Ninety percent of classrooms in the mid-21st century are virtual. Teaching personas are generated by artificial technology based on composites of psyche-scans donated by distinguished educators from the past two decades. The idea of a flesh-and-blood teacher instructing at one location for many hours of the day now seems archaic and inefficient.

The concept of a virtual reality enclosure was first imagined by science fiction writers a hundred years ago, beginning with a short story by Ray Bradbury in 1950. The technology became a reality in 2030 with the first anime theme park, Wyden’s Forest in Tokyo, built entirely of laser-generated matter, beams and fields.

What inspired Sami Stoneman to bring the school back from the dead?

“Life changed for me while I went there,” he said. “My dad died my first year of middle school. I realized I didn’t identify with the gender that was forced on me. And an amazing teacher, Judith Griffiths, helped me learn to channel my pain through art. That’s when I was first drawn to the light.”

Sami is talking about holograms, of course, but there’s a little bit of heaven present in his work, as well. “I went from believing in nothing, to believing in the transcendence of art.”

After his middle school years, Sami’s mother remarried and the family relocated to Miami, Florida. In high school, he gravitated to both the sciences and the arts, and was top of his class in both.

In his senior year, he scored an international scholarship to study physics and electrical engineering at the Berlin Institute of Technology (BIT), but was forced to work remotely for his final year of high school because of Covid-19 school closures. After earning his undergraduate degree, he was awarded a post-graduate fellowship at the BIT, where holography was originally developed.

Pandemic struck again in the second year of his graduate studies, and he had to return home after member EU countries closed borders when a deadly Covid-21 variant surfaced in Poland in 2022. Other countries followed suit, and a repeat of the 2020 pandemic was avoided, but left international students in the lurch.

These interruptions in his education and the social distancing required would impact Stoneman’s work for the rest of his life.

“The whole pandemic experience made me rethink what I wanted to accomplish with my art. So much of what we all went through at that time was experienced alone. Whether it was music, video or doing a virtual tour of a museum, it was mostly devoid of the influence of our peers,” he said. “I wanted my work to be fully experienced on a very personal, very subjective level.”

Sami returned to the U.S. and earned advanced degrees in visual media and architectural design at the University of Florida.

He caught the imagination of Roy Bezos, CEO of Amazon-Disney, Inc., with his proposal for a holotheme park in Orlando. The park merged cutting edge light tech with big concept storylines that were eventually spun off into billion-dollar movie franchises, “Moon Beserkers” and “Johnny, Seeds of Dark.”

But Sami wanted his creations to do more than entertain. place where my life was changed, Goodyear Middle School. My life was in chaos and might have gone down a darker path if it wasn’t for the influence of my art teacher.”

The idea of recreating the place where his life changed forever wouldn’t let him go. At age 50, Sami used the considerable royalties he had made through his association with Amazon-Disney, and returned to his hometown in 2045 to begin work on the project.

“I wanted to show how a person’s life can change because of those small moments, when words imparted by a caring teacher can actually matter,” he said. “Knowledge used to be shared in brick-and-mortar institutions, before schools were replaced by online learning centers and alternative teaching pods.

“History teaches us to honor our roots,” he said. “I wanted Akron to remember its urban beginnings, when teachers were human, and not AI-bots, and when ideas were founded in truth rather than software.”

// A native of Barberton, Karla Tipton earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Kent State University and spent 14 years as a staff reporter and editor at the Antelope Valley Press in California before returning home. She is the author of two time travel romantic fantasy novels. She keeps busy writing, working in the IT field, playing rock guitar, photographing urban settings and enjoying the local arts and music scene.

Wasn’t Tomorrow Wonderful? Imagining Downtown Akron in 2050

by Jennifer Kidd

Disclaimer: The following is a work of realistic fiction for our special 2050 issue, published in June 2021. These stories are meant to spark imagination, not forecast the future of Akron.

I’m making my way down the music corridor to Glendale for the monthly Akron Symphony performance on the steps. I find myself thinking about how lucky we are that after the pandemic the arts came back in such a strong way. It became so clear to all of us that the arts are where we turn for comfort, for inspiration, for community.

As this area grew in size and became what we now call the music corridor, everything nearby began to sound different. It sounds like children learning and playing music. It sounds like beautiful voices echoing through the buildings and around the trees until they make their way to your ears. It sounds like friends briskly walking arm in arm to the next venue so they don’t miss the upcoming act. It sounds like pianos and violins and trumpets and drums. It sounds like old friends catching up as they gather for a meal before an outdoor performance. It sounds like laughter. It sounds alive. I listen closely and I hear the students practicing inside of The Open Tone Music School. I love it when they leave the windows open. I can’t help but think of the music being created by the kids and how it starts with one small note and grows for years to come. It is such a joy to see former students teaching the next generations. The students must be preparing their sets for this year’s International Rubber City Jazz and Blues Fest. Every year of Jazz Fest has been wildly successful, bringing in legends from all over the world. This year’s headliner is none other than Teagan Brown making her big return home. While walking past the LeGrair Vocal Academy, I pause to listen. My advice is always pause to listen. World class vocalists reside here. The boom in music education throughout the past 30 years in Akron has been such a gift. I will never cease to be amazed at the amount of talent that comes from here and comes home here. I head south and run into an old friend standing outside the bookshop. There are always old friends at the bookshop. I stop in the record store to say hi and see what the new releases are. I buy a vinyl re-issue of “Where in The Hell is Akron, Oh?” I run into the small grocery to grab a drink and some fresh fruit. I pick up some flowers for another friend on the way out. I pass the outdoor tables and hear laughter and warmth. I pass the picnic area and see kids playing and frolicking while their families gather. All of this in downtown. I look up and scope out the marquee to see what is coming up at the EarthQuaker Pavilion. EarthQuaker Devices has never shied away from bringing a good time to Akron. Their pavilion grand opening giant balloon parade catapulted the annual EarthQuaker Day to permanent nextlevel status. I walk through the venue alley and hear “1-2, 1-2, let’s try that again” as sound checks take place. The music fans gather up front and the tour vans all line up around back. Who ever thought that venue hopping could be a thing here?

Next weekend is the North Hill International Music Festival. What started off as a small festival of world music put together by the Himalayan Music Academy has grown into something beyond our wildest dreams. Ten stages of performers and artists from all over the world will be stretching from North Hill down to the Glendale Community Steps. You can see an overview of the pop-up restaurants, shops, theater performances and other activities online. Bring your appetite. Hands down, the best food of the year.

I encourage you to pause and listen and imagine what you’d like to hear 30 years from now in 2080. Imagine where you’d like to hear it and who you’d like to hear it with. Imagine the kids of today picking up their first instrument and what that will look like in 30 years. Imagine that future. It’s all possible.

The title for Wasn’t Tomorrow Wonderful? is taken from a 1982 album and song by Akron legends The Waitresses.

// Jenn Kidd is a multimedia artist and creative consultant who spends a lot of time thinking about the future of downtown Akron. She currently serves as the Creative Director of the Historic Arts District and General Manager of Musica. She asks that you support artists voraciously when things return to normal.

An Interview with Ave Hummings, 2050 student commencement speaker for Akron’s School of Life & Impact.

by EbaNee Bond

Disclaimer: The following is a work of realistic fiction for our special 2050 issue, published in June 2021. These stories are meant to spark imagination, not forecast the future of Akron.

In 2021, analysis after analysis reported that the continual mistreatment of humans and resources would produce disastrous outcomes that would lead to society collapsing on itself. By the early half of the 2030s, 37% of the workforce was walking off their jobs, college enrollment had been decreasing by 11% annually for five years, public transportation couldn’t support the 45% increase in mobility needs for people who couldn’t drive their cars due to unaffordable gas prices and the price of food and water had increased 27%.

Fortunately, The School of Life & Impact (SLI) started preparing for this in 2025 right here in Akron, OH. I got the chance to sit down with Ave Humming, a student from The Akron School of Life & Impact’s recent 20th graduating class who also happens to be the daughter of one of the founders.

EbaNee Bond: Tell us about how The School of Life & Impact got started. of Life & Impact were so passionate about creating more sustainable relationships with each other and Mother Earth. They didn’t like to see each other muddling their potential and were just so thirsty to do something different. They started with learning about different facets of personal and community development and critically defining what community meant to them. For them, community not only meant having shared values but focused on the idea that you couldn’t separate community from proximity. So, they began with investing in a block and buying every property on it, including a church and school building.

As they began to build culture on their block, more and more people wanted to be a part of and buy into the community. That’s when they realized that they needed a process for including outsiders and that’s where The School of Life & Impact came into play.

They made it so that all new aspiring members had to go through a three year educational and experiential learning camp known as The School of Life & Impact. Upon completion of the camp, aspiring members had to then go before a council of founders and wise members in a week-long ritual ceremony where the council collectively decides if the member is in alignment with the vision, mission and values of the community and are ready to be a contributing member.

Twenty-five years ago the coalition started with a block and their own education. Now, we have a whole neighborhood and eight different SLI campuses across the country. It’s really beautiful.

What is The Akron School of Life & Impact (ASLI) like?

At ASLI, no one majors in anything but the thing they want to explore and the impact they want to make locally, but with a global mindset. Classes are more so discussions and project-based and are either hosted in the community centers or right in people’s living rooms. The only mandatory classes are on improving learning skills, isms, cultural phobias, trauma, breathing, personal finance, sociology, history, interpersonal skills and self-expression. Beyond that, we aren’t forced to learn anything but instead have agency in our own learning so we end up being more confident and proud.

How does the school operate and sustain itself?

Everyone in the collective agrees to a personal income cap at $200k/ yr. All additional income is invested back into research and development for the growth and expansion of the community. Anyone making less than $200k/year agrees to donate a small percentage of their monthly income. Also, the majority of profits

from businesses started by those in the community go back into the community.

Tell us a little bit more about yourself, Ave, and what influence both the coalition and ASLI had on you.

I was born in Akron but I got to spend a lot of time in different places across the country growing up, kind of like army brats but instead of visiting different military bases, my bases were different School of Life and Impact campuses. Akron was just more like homebase. It was very cool. Every campus had its own culture and unique impact based on its environment.

There couldn’t have been a better way for me to grow up since I kind of like to be detached from fitting in and enjoy taking in a lot of information from my environment to try to make sense of it all in a way that’s productive.

The coalition helped and were very intentional about building my identity and work ethic at a young age. I was raised to have a strong sense of contributing to the family and community in a way that was true to me but also filled a gap.

If you ask me to describe myself, I would say that I’m introverted but funny as hell. I’ve been described as brave and intense, which is quite

What do you most admire about your parents and the rest of the founding members?

The fact that they didn’t really care to get buy-in from outsiders nor did they care to do the ‘politically nice dance.’ They said that it took them a while to come to that point but the founders understood that if they had each other and a focus on the collective, that’s all they needed. I think it’s really swaggy that they knew to protect my generation from the future. I have so much respect for them and their prudence. People from all walks of life are craving something different and we have that.

You mention the word community a lot. What does the community look like?

It looks like love and healthy humanity in action. We play games, sing, dance and enjoy our free time together. Families eat together, which is important. We have thriving farms that members of the collective maintain to sustain our community. On some level, we barter for goods and services and try the best we can to keep everything within the community.

Do you have friends who went the traditional educational route? If so, what do you think is different from their experience and the experience of The School of Life and Impact graduates?

We have a strong sense of dignity and worthiness, consideration and protection. We have a deep respect for ourselves and each other because we wholeheartedly embrace our differences. We want everyone to shine. It’s so beautiful. We all get to be bold artists and architects of our lives. If you shine, it makes it more natural for me to shine.

Also, nobody does celebrations like us!!! So much love and so much fun, so much!

What are you most proud of?

Two things. In our communities, there’s no such thing as poverty. That’s not even for the birds in the sky or the lilies of the field. There’s no sense of competition for resources. To us, poverty is the absence of family or community. There’s collaboration to maximize resources. Nobody walks around like, “Am I tripping, or does this not make sense?”

The other thing that I’m particularly proud of is the execution of our yearly convention, which always has a turn up weekend. Planning for that turn up weekend launched the #1 music education program in the country. This is not your ordinary music education program. People learn how to launch the most robust and unique music festivals. People learn the engineering, science, and research side of creating music technology, including anything that requires electricity or batteries, coding the software programs, designing of stages and structures, working with the city’s civil engineering department, etc. This production is inclusive of all skillsets, from science and technology to the arts and humanities. Everything from people working on the festival participants’ experience, marketing the event, handling legalities, to the actual performers, artists and more. People learn so many transferable skills while creating experiences of a lifetime from scratch.

No one has a major, but they have a desired impact to work toward… what was yours?

The question that I sought to answer is how might we better serve all of God’s creations, in all of their glory. I conceptualized and implemented experiments using technology to provide highly personalized growth plans for not only individuals At a traditional university, this might look like majoring in human potentialization with specialties in computer programming, homeostasis, cooperative sustainability and electromechanical engineering.

Sweet! What’s next for you now that you’ve graduated?

Continue to work to protect the future generation. Stay tuned for what I mean.

Any final words that you would like to leave us with?

Akron is now a lighthouse for the marginalized, the underestimated and the under potentialized. There are now other cities who have replicated our model and more and more people are dwelling in love.

There are not enough words or ways to pay homage to my parents and the School of Life & Impact team. I simply leave you with, thank you, because the future ain’t what it used to be.

// EbaNee Bond is a podcaster, facilitator, creative, elevator and champion of fairness. She’s from Mansfield, OH and has lived in Akron for 12 years. She can be reached at EbaNeeBond@gmail.com.

ARTS AL VE

awards

Special thanks to our 2021 Arts Alive Sponsors:

Brio Performance Solutions Pickard Commercial Group Witschey Witschey & Firestine Co. LPA Kleidon & Associates John Fitzpatrick and Arrye Rosser

Get your (free!) tickets today

For more info, scan code or visit

summitartspace.org

Join us for an arts-inspired virtual evening celebrating those who bring art to life and are shaping the future!

VIRTUAL AWARD ANNOUNCEMENT

Thursday, June 17 @ 7:00pm Meet this year's 14 Arts Alive Award recipients artists, visionaries, and advocates who fuel creativity in Akron and beyond.

VIRTUAL AUCTION

Bid through midnight on June 17th! Win incredible artwork by local artists.

biddingforgood.com/summitartspace

We Won! Akron brings home two awards at the North American Biodiversity Summit

by Emily Anderson

Disclaimer: The following is a work of realistic fiction for our special 2050 issue, published in June 2021. These stories are meant to spark imagination, not forecast the future of Akron.

Last month, Frankie Page was invited for the fourth time to attend the North American Biodiversity Summit (NABS) in

Chicago. She attends every year as a representative of Akron, networking on behalf of us all with environmental advocates and engineers from around the world. The last three times she went, Akron was invited as a participating city but not nominated for any awards. This year was different. Frankie came home bearing two prestigious awards - Most

Improved Neighborhood Biodiversity (West Hill) and Best New Pollination

Program (Merriman Valley).

Frankie Page is the founder of Bright Green, an organization that has been spearheading green initiatives in Northeast Ohio since 2034. Bright Green, in collaboration with the Akron-Canton Regional Food Bank and the local government, has made Akron a midwestern leader in lawn conversion and biodiversity protection. Allowing native plants to thrive where tidy grass once lived helps clean carbon dioxide from the air, supports a stable food chain in our ecosystem and protects the natural reproduction cycle of local plant and insect species.

Bright Green has been focusing on improving the biodiversity in West Hill specifically for the last five years, which is one reason why Frankie was so proud to accept the Most Improved Neighborhood Biodiversity award for this area.

The residents of West Hill work together to maintain a large community garden full of native edible plants and frequent educational workshops on how to sustainably collect and use food from them. Volunteers use donated space for keeping bees and community composting, and the use of toxic chemicals has been nearly eradicated.

According to Frankie, “West Hill has been on the cutting edge of community cooperation and sustainable living for the last 30 years. The hard work, unity and thoughtfulness displayed by the neighbors in this area should be an inspiration to everyone. This award is for them - they earned it!”

Merriman Valley’s award was no small feat, either. “The Valley already has so much protected green space that we wanted to focus on another aspect of biodiversity in this neighborhood,” Frankie explains. “With enormous participation from the residents and local businesses, we increased the pollinator population by 30%!”

Pollinating insects, like bees and butterflies, feed off the pollen of flowers. Many native plants produce flowers, they’re just oftentimes kept cut short and never get the chance. By allowing plants to grow and produce flowers, we provide insects with more food. This strengthens the food chain and the entire ecosystem.

In the Valley, Frankie and her team got local businesses to integrate pollinator-attracting plants into their landscaping, residential yards were allowed to grow wild around the edges, and five businesses started rooftop gardens.

While Bright Green has made great accomplishments this year, they’re eager to get back to work come spring. What do they have planned next? They’re turning their attention towards the Downtown area, which is cleaner than ever and ready to be utilized. “The lack of gas-powered vehicles on the streets these days has opened up so much more available space for growing,” says Frankie, who dreams of one day hosting the NABS in Akron.

If you’re not already involved with the Bright Green movement here in Akron, you should be! Whether you have a small window box or acres of field to work with, there are ways you can participate. Start by building a compost system in your yard, volunteering with a nearby community garden or simply choosing not to use toxic chemicals on your property. To learn more about our native plants here in Akron, visit the West Hill Local Garden or check out the Bright Green website.

// Emily Anderson’s favorite native species is Sambucus canadensis, also known as elderberry.